


End-User Experience

by coraxes



Series: dishonored shorts [7]
Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Canon Disabled Character, Gen, Pre-Dishonored 2 (Video Game), Prostheses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-17
Updated: 2019-10-17
Packaged: 2020-12-21 09:14:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21072485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coraxes/pseuds/coraxes
Summary: Meagan gave up on the hook after two weeks.





	End-User Experience

Meagan gave up on the hook after two weeks. After the first day she was ready to throw it overboard, but she had hoped the blisters would heal. Turned out callouses protesting every time she had to pull a switch were worse.

Anton offered to help her tie off the empty half of her sleeve, and when she refused, he ran back to his rooms and came back with a measuring tape.

“What are you doing?” Meagan asked, narrowing her eyes. Eye. She hadn’t gotten used to the singular yet but at least she didn’t want to throw up just thinking about it anymore.

“Taking measurements.” He darted behind Meagan and ran the tape along her shoulders.

Meagan snorted. “I noticed.” She held out her whole arm anyway. He measured from elbow to fingertip. “Have you ever actually made a fake hand, Anton?”

He paused long enough to glare at her over his glasses like a disappointed schoolteacher. “I _am _the royal physician.”

“That’s not a yes,” Meagan muttered.

“And I don’t plan to make anything as simple as a false hand. Or a hook, for that matter,” he added with a satisfied smirk, eyes already far away as the gears in his brain began to turn.

Meagan worried he’d try a hand transplant, or worse, attempt some magic again. (He thought she didn’t recognize the symbols he scribbled in his drafting notebooks. Meagan liked him, but what a choffer, honestly. She thought—hoped—she’d still know if he managed to summon the Outsider.) But she couldn’t deny the speck of hope it gave her, either. It was Anton. And he could hardly make her arm _worse._

It took three weeks before he approached her with a rig of harnesses and cables and a strange, three-pronged appendage at the end. Meagan was swabbing the deck; she’d finally managed to find a comfortable way to hold the mop. “What’s that supposed to be?”

“It’s a body-powered prosthetic,” Anton said imperiously. “Take off your shirt.”

“Go fuck yourself,” said Meagan reflexively, but she took off her first couple of layers and let Anton guide her into the harness. The fabric wasn’t bad, and he’d made a little sock to go at the end of her arm between her skin and the socket of the prosthetic. Once he hooked everything up she could feel the tension of the cables. Meagan bent and straightened her arm, and the three metal “fingers” at the end of the prosthetic opened and closed.

She felt clumsy. The socket was a tad too loose, and the cables pinched her skin where they slipped past the guards of the harness. But it was better than nothing, right? Definitely better than her shitty hook.

“Thanks, Anton.” She bent and straightened her arm again, trying to get a feel for how the hand worked.

He watched her movements with his eyes narrowed, already planning out his next improvements, and clapped her on the shoulder. “Of course. Let me know what needs to be adjusted.”

She put up with that rig for a month. Partly because of Anton, but mostly because Meagan _wanted _it to work, wanted to have two hands again. But it just never sat right. Her sock always bunched up, or the cable would spring loose while she was in the middle of fixing the engine, or the harness would start sliding down her back as she helped unload cargo. In another life she’d learned to treat weapons like extensions of herself, relied on magic powers like extra limbs. This wasn’t an extension of herself; it was a replacement. 

When Anton went back to Dunwall to do his royal physician shit for a couple of months Meagan took off the harness and threw it under the bed.

_Not working but thanks for trying, _she wrote him, letters as painstakingly awkward as when she first learned with a handful of other whalers. _Next time you come on board what about pedals for the pilot house. Lots of pedals. & handles I can stick my elbow through._

He wrote back, _I have told you before that muscles operate using electric signals? It might take me a few years to get a hand that responds to such signals correctly, but it would certainly be more natural._

_ABSOLUTELY NOT, _said Meagan, and underlined it four times for good measure.

**Author's Note:**

> I was researching disability for another project and came across some interesting statistics about hand prosthetic development. And I've always wondered why Meagan didn't have a false hand in the game despite being BFFs with Sokolov. So...[waves hands]. 
> 
> All prostheses discussed here are real. Meagan's first is the classic hook and the second is a body-powered split hook. Sokolov was looking into myoelectric prostheses; those are actually pretty standard-issue now.


End file.
